Satyan Mishra of Drishtee is developing sustainable communities in the villages of India. In the late 1990s, while Satyan Mishra was working on a government contract, he had the opportunity to visit many villages across India. In India, more than 775 million people live in small villages. Nearly half of them live on less than one…

Solar Micro Smart Grids are Lighting up the Tanzanian Countryside After graduating from university in 2007, Gianluca Cescon and his friend Fabio De Pascale spent time backpacking in Guyana. As they made their way through small villages, they came across a number of broken solar power projects. Gianluca told me “The problem was not the…

New Story is disrupting community development. They accomplish that through a story-driven crowdfunding process for building homes. But, they’re not just building houses, they’re creating communities. And, in the process, they are changing the donor experience. To explain all of this, we’re joined today by Alexandria Lafci, a cofounder and the head of operations for New…

Lakheni works in South African townships. If you’re not familiar with the townships of South Africa, during apartheid, these were the areas outside of city centers where black people were required to live. During these years, the South African government failed to invest in infrastructure such as water, sewage, electricity and roads. Without infrastructure, commerce…

Francesco Piazzesi uses housing as a means of community development. He grew up in the construction equipment industry. He noticed that the brick mason who spent his days building houses went home to a tin shack with a dirt floor. In many countries around the world, including Mexico, 2/3 of the houses built are built…

Early in the morning of December 26, 2004, an underwater earthquake sent a massive tsunamis along the countries bordering the Indian Ocean, killing 230,000 people in 14 countries. It was one of the deadliest natural disasters in recorded history. We have talked about this tsunami before, in episode 11 with Gayatri Datar of EarthEnable. In…

Where were you on September 11, 2001? If you were more than three years old at the time, there’s a good chance that you remember. Sasha Fisher grew up about five blocks from “ground zero.” At the time, Sasha was in middle school. This event caused Sasha to begin to think outside of her neighborhood,…

You may have seen shea butter as an ingredient, especially in high-end beauty products. But did you know that in Africa, shea butter is called “women’s gold”? Funlayo Alabi and her husband share a common problem, dry skin. They have a son who had kidney problems, and he also had very dry skin. Their second…